Solutions that don’t break the bank, reinvent the wheel or marginalize our teachers are within our grasp. We could have rigorous classes, safe and disciplined schools and treat teachers like valued colleagues rather than easily replaceable cogs, and we could do so tomorrow if we wanted. Disclaimer, this is an opinion and commentary site and should not be confused as a news site, and you should know that quite often people may disagree with the opinions posted herein.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Education under assult nationwide

From the New York Times

by Sam Dillon

After several years of state and local budget cuts, thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year, even though virtually everyone involved in education agrees that American students need more instruction time.

Los Angeles slashed its budget for summer classes to $3 million from $18 million last year, while Philadelphia, Milwaukee and half the school districts in North Carolina have deeply cut their programs or zeroed them out. A scattering of rural districts in New Mexico, Idaho and other states will be closed on Fridays or Mondays come September. And in California, where some 600 of the 1,100 local districts have shortened the calendar by up to five days over the past two years, lawmakers last week authorized them to cut seven days more if budgets get tighter.

“Instead of increasing school time, in a lot of cases we’ve been pushing back against efforts to shorten not just the school day but the week and year,” said Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the federal Department of Education. “We’re trying to prevent what exists now from shrinking even further.”

For two decades, advocates have been working to modernize the nation’s traditional 180-day school calendar, saying that the languid summers evoked in “To Kill a Mockingbird” have a pernicious underside: each fall, many students — especially those who are poor — return to school having forgotten much of what they learned the previous year. The Obama administration picked up the mantra: at his 2009 confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared, “Our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short,” but its efforts in this realm have not been as successful as other initiatives.

“It feels like it’s been pushed to the back burner a bit,” said Jeff Smink, a vice president at the National Summer Learning Association in Baltimore.

The most ambitious federal program in this realm is part of a $4 billion effort to overhaul 1,150 failing schools, in which each is required to select an improvement model that includes a new schedule increasing learning time. In the Denver suburbs, for example, Fort Logan Elementary School has used the federal money to add four and a half hours of instruction per week.

But an interim report on the program in 10 states found that several districts visited by federal inspectors were out of compliance. In Reno, Nev., for example, officials found that Smithridge Elementary School was using the 15 minutes it had added each morning for breakfast, not academics. District officials in San Francisco, the report said, “believed that Everett Middle School extended the school day by an hour six years ago and due to this reason was not required to implement any additional time.”

In a separate report scheduled for release on Thursday, the National Center on Time and Learning, a Boston group that advocates expanding instruction time, acknowledges that an “untold number” of schools nationwide have reduced their hours and days, often by furloughing teachers. But the report also says more than 1,000 schools and districts have expanded their schedules, and highlights many examples.

In Pittsburgh, for example, $11 million in federal stimulus money is being used this summer to provide 5,300 students — more than twice the 2,400 enrolled last year — 23 additional days of math and reading instruction in a camplike atmosphere that converts some of the city’s museums, recording studios and even bicycle-repair shops into classrooms.

In the small town of Brandon, S.D., near Sioux Falls, some 65 teachers and principals plan to work without pay this summer to keep alive a summer school program that would have otherwise been canceled because of cuts in state aid.

And in Chicago, which has had one of the shortest school days of any major urban system, Mayor Rahm Emanuel won powers last month to impose a longer day and year. Mr. Emanuel is working with school authorities to add time for the fall term.

But each of these seems to have a counterexample.

Across Oregon, districts have been negotiating furlough days with teachers’ unions. In April, for instance, the local union agreed with the 17,000-student North Clackamas district, south of Portland, to six unpaid days off in 2011-12, leaving students with 168 days of class. Many of Oregon’s 200 districts have cut similar deals. The average number of days teachers are scheduled to be with students next year fell to 165 from 167 this year, according to a survey by the Oregon School Boards Association.

Oregon sets minimum annual instructional hours — 990 hours for ninth grade, for example. Most states set minimum days, and several that do — including Arizona, California and Nevada — have lowered the bar amid belt tightening. Nevada’s new law, signed in June, allows as few as 175 days, down from 180.

California made the same cut in 2009, but last week dropped the minimum to 168 for any district where revenues fall short of projections during the 2011-12 school year. Hawaii, mired in red ink, shortened its 180-day school year to 163 days in 2009, shuttering schools on many Fridays. But lawsuits and widespread protests last year persuaded lawmakers to restore the school year to 178 days.

Last month, North Carolina lawmakers moved in the same direction, raising the state’s minimum to 185 days of instruction, up from 180. But since the legislature provided no additional financing, some education officials there were less than thrilled.

The 2,800-student Balsz elementary district in Phoenix adopted a 200-day calendar starting in 2009-10, drawing on a local tax levy and a decade-old state law that increased financing by 5 percent for districts that meet that threshold. “Parents love it,” said Jeffrey Smith, the superintendent. And Mr. Smith said the results were palpable: after one year of the new schedule, reading scores jumped 43 percent in Grades 5 and 6 and 19 percent in Grades 3 and 4.

And if many students groan at the notion of spending more time in class, some have warmed to it.

Rubi Morales, for instance, said that when she started six years ago at the Preuss charter school in San Diego, which has seven hours of class (instead of the typical six) 198 days of the year, she resented returning to her gritty neighborhood in the evenings to find all her friends roughhousing in the streets.

“They were doing fun stuff, and I’d be getting home and doing homework,” recalled Ms. Morales, 18, who is headed to the University of California, Berkeley, this fall. “Now I see all those study hours paid off.”